


be still my foolish heart.

by reygrets



Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Drabble Collection, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Ficlet Collection, Fix-It of Sorts, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, I don't know what to tag this as, Mutual Pining, Post-Canon, Vignette, and SMUT, frank castle with a dog is life changing, lots of kisses, this is literally just a tumblr ficlet collection
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-25
Updated: 2019-02-26
Packaged: 2019-10-15 21:49:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 11,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17536892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reygrets/pseuds/reygrets
Summary: a collection of kastle drabbles, ficlets, and one-shots from my tumblr. beginning notes will contain the prompt or inspiration, enjoy!





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> prompt: we're not just friends and you fucking know it.

It’s cold in January, wet cold, the kind cold that has Karen Page clutching her coffee like a lifeline to her numb fingertips. Anything to thaw out as she stands with snow melting into puddles at her feet, in the hallway outside of Ellison’s office. She’s started staking him out every day - in between meetings, editorial reviews, and even at his favorite hot dog stand.  _ You’re stalking me _ , he pointed out a handful of times, only to be met by Karen listing the practicalities of giving her her job back (and she has not nor will she ever take ‘no’ for an answer). 

 

They settle someplace in the middle. Compromise, it’s called, where Karen will be a freelance journalist and provide the Bulletin with pieces that come from her and are run as an advocate for the independent New Yorker’s voice.

 

_ But _ , he’d lifted his finger up to tone down her giddy, delighted outburst, _ you have to run a piece on Frank Castle, an honest one. _

 

There’s no shortage of suspicion, edged under the rim of his glasses or how he sees Karen, really and truly sees her - until she’s forced to reluctantly concede.

 

So that’s where she is now, sitting cross-legged at the foot of her bed with only the title of ‘He’s not who they say he is’ and a long, blank page beneath it mocking her.

 

How does she begin to quantify her relationship with Frank? Does she start from the beginning? How and where she knew she could trust the man every media outlet painted as a monster?

 

Karen’s fears are rooted in selfishness; what will people think of her, if they knew. If they knew that she smiled at him, bruised and bloody. If they knew that he’d used his body as a shield from bullets, and she’d held on just a little bit longer than necessary. If they knew she cried when the roses started to wilt or when setting them on her window sill became a melancholic habit, knowing he wouldn’t call.

 

She slams her laptop shut, the glow of the screen had been the only source of light in her room, leaving Karen staring into the abyss like it might provide inspiration. Pretending that even now, her broken heart doesn’t cast a shadow in the dark.

 

This is her chance to get back into Ellison’s good graces and she’s not going to martyr herself over it. It’s just an article. She’s written a thousand of them about a thousand different people and it didn’t matter then, so why does it now?

 

Frank’s the one who is gone. She doesn’t owe him her silence after a year of his.

 

Karen grabs a beer from her fridge, brings her laptop into the living room, and gets to typing. It doesn’t have to be an extensive expose, the nitty-gritty details can be glossed over. The public wouldn’t care if she tweaked some things, painted Frank as a friend she needed, not necessarily as one she chose.

 

It’s a lie. A column's worth of it. But by the time six A.M rolls around, Karen’s done. She stares at what she’s just written, neatly packaged as an attachment in the email sent to the Bulletin’s newest editor, and feels  _ nothing  _ like the thrill she’d had, bringing down scandals, exposing criminals, doing right by the downtrodden and exacting justice onto the cruel. It’s the least excited she’s ever been to see her byline and knows that Ellison won’t believe a word of it anyway.

 

But it’s her shot to reintroduce normalcy into her life and at this point, Karen is desperate to have a routine.

 

_ She’s mad at Frank _ , Karen realized the moment she pressed send. And somehow, admitting that to herself in the cold, dim light of dawn, is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. She’s sobbing on her couch, big and ugly, gasps ripped out of her throat and tears so thick she can’t see, can’t blink them away. They’re like tar. Keeping all the hurt inside has rotted her, and she’d done it for so long. For everything. For everyone.

 

Locked away Ben, Daniel, Kevin, even James Wesley. There’s so much she should have written about. So much she should have said.

 

Maybe tell the world that Frank Castle had kissed her cheek, that he’d pleaded with her with a broken voice, haunted by all he’d already lost, that he couldn’t lose her too. She’d called him a friend, and what’s worse, she’d written like it was … an anecdote. Not something, or someone, who’d kept her going through the worst of it. When the world had been the cold steel of a bomb at her back, and Frank had come for her.

 

It’s pulling venom from a wound, too long left neglected.

 

Karen cries, and cries until it’s noon and the only thing she has to show for a morning well spent is red, puffy eyes and a raging migraine. Two painkillers washed down the remainder of last night’s beer, and she opens her laptop right back up, squinting until she fumbles to turn the brightness down.

 

She’d write something real, this time. It wouldn’t be for the public, it isn’t something constructed for accolades or clout. It’s … a diary, maybe. An autobiographical apology to everyone she’s let down and hoping that letting out this ache, venting it, might keep her from falling to pieces entirely.

 

Karen spends the next twelve hours writing nonstop. The blur of her fingers over the keys fades into the backdrop, she doesn’t stop to eat or drink, she doesn’t even edit grammatical mistakes that sit there, underlined in red.

 

It starts with Kevin. And it ends with Frank.

 

She falls asleep holding the still-warm computer to her chest. No concept of what time it is, or what she’d even written, only the satisfaction in knowing she’d actually said something she meant, regardless of whether or not anyone ever saw a word of it.

 

Karen wakes up to wind rushing across her living room, bringing with it the bone-chill of winter in Hell’s Kitchen - she’s frazzled, disoriented - she could swear up and down that she’d closed that window last night long before she’d drifted off.

 

When she stands to close it, however, there’s a shadow standing in the hall, and Karen freezes until the  headlights of a passing car illuminate him.

 

Illuminate Frank.

 

“Jesus,” her hand falls to her chest, heart pounding underneath it. “I have a front door, you know. With a doorbell. It works and everything.” Karen’s go-to defense mechanism; dry humor. Pretending that the sight of him doesn’t spring tears to her eyes (when she’d made the mistake of thinking she’d cried them all away). She’s already turned towards the kitchen - it’s still dark out, so grabbing another beer can hardly hurt.

 

He’s got something in his hand, it’s -- a newspaper? His fingers are fisted around it, knuckles white and he’s breathing like he’d just run a marathon to get here, eyes wild, unfocused, far away.

 

“What’s that --?” trailing off, she points to the paper with her beer before twisting the cap off and padding her way back to the couch on socked feet.

 

Her phone is dead,  _ fantastic _ , and she’s immediately distracted by the hunt for her charger cable, plugging it into her laptop with a victorious sound. Frank hasn’t moved, and she’s doing just about everything she can to ignore him. Out of spite, fear, or guilt, Karen hasn’t decided.

 

When her phone powers on, Karen frowns at the screen - it’s not tomorrow, it’s  _ tomorrow’s  _ tomorrow. Evidently, her writing catharsis had been more like a coma and she’d slept for twenty-six hours. No wonder she’s in a fog.

 

“We’re not just friends and you fucking know it.”

 

“---what?”

 

“We’re not just friends and you fucking  _ know  _ it,” Frank says, slo wer, through his teeth. Like he’s.. Like he’s  _ mad  _ at her for not understanding the first time around. She blinks owlishly at him, surprised by the sudden display of rage.

 

He throws the newspaper at her, opened up to page four and wrinkled to hell but - she makes out the article Ellison had run. She smiles sleepily at her byline -- it’d been a wild forty-eight hours -- and then her brows furrow as comprehension settles in and then it’s a punch to the get when she realizes what he said.

 

“Frank I--”

 

He’s pacing. Hands shoved into the shallow pockets of his windbreaker and jaw tight (the muscle in it jumps, flexing every time he rotates to pace the other way).

 

“That what you think of me, Karen? Just… some  _ schmuck  _ who came into your life an’ sure, maybe I saved it a couple’a times but it’s just par for the fuckin’ course for our  _ friendship _ ?” The last word catches on his teeth, broken, and it breaks Karen just a little bit too.

 

She stumbles up, hand on the edge of her couch while her feet slide against the hardwood floor. It might be a comical sight, under any other set of circumstances, but as it stands, it just makes Karen look every inch of the fool she felt then, “You know - you know that’s not what I think about you, Frank. You should know me better than that.” It’s hollow, and Frank barks a humorless laugh.

 

That just makes Karen angry.

 

“ _ You left. _ ” Interjected, stiff upper lip and all, “-you-you left without a word, Frank. Gone. I had to reach out to Agent Madani just to hear that you’d been granted some leeway by the CIA and homeland … I was … I thought you were  _ dead _ .” Her resolve is wavering, the words tremble at the end, betraying the false front of her composure.

 

Frank’s fingers twitch at his side, but he doesn’t reach out to her. Doesn’t speak. He hangs his head a bit, tilted towards her so she knows he’s still listening.

 

Her eyes glance, briefly (and treacherously) towards the roses, half-dead on the ledge of her window and she hopes he didn’t notice. But he does. Of course, he does. He’s Frank, and he takes in a staggered breath.

 

“Karen… the dust settled an’ I was... I needed time, alright? You’re right I shoulda… shoulda called, maybe yeah.. And I sure as shit didn’t expect you to wait for me, some Jane Doe with her man out to war but..  _ This _ ?” his voice is that low, steady thunder that makes her toes curl and her heart stop, but Karen can only continue to let the tears fall down her cheeks in silence. He picks up the article, crumples it in his fist, “I have killed for you. Nearly died for you. I’m not just your fuckin’ friend,” Frank means it to sound stalwart, but in the context, it just comes across like:  _ please _ .

 

“What -- what more do I gotta do to show you, Kar? I” His adam's apple bobs, rough as sandpaper but he’s asking her, the honesty of it makes him tremble. He’s afraid of her answer.

 

“Stay.” and that’s the core of it. He left her. He always left and most of the time it’s alright because she knew he had to but he’d been safe. They could have been, safe, and he’d been gone all the same so she doesn’t have a solution at the ready. She just wants him to -- “stay, Frank. Please.”

 

Frank takes one step forward, hesitating before the next. And after a few more tense moments of this swaying in the space between them, he closes the distance and wraps her up in his arms, only to find out that she too, is shaking.

 

“You know I can’t,” at her ear, a frantic whisper but in it is a desperation that she has to hear, has to know. “Not all of the time but I will… I’ll stay, an’ when I can’t, when I gotta go I’ll come back to you - if you want me. If you want me here I’ll be here, Karen.” He pulls back because she’s not speaking, there’s doubt cut into the crease of her brow. A sadness in her eyes that he’d put there and is kicking himself for it.

 

Frank reaches under the collar of his shirt, pulls a silver chain over his head and slips it over Karen’s wordlessly, his thumb sweeping the raised letters on the dog tag that comes to rest just beneath her collarbone. “I’m makin’ a promise to you, Miss Page. I still got things.. Loose ends... I might need time an’ shit but I will always come back for you.” 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt: Frank's comes back from yeehaw states after dd3 and is with Karen and he knows about everything that happened and they're just in bed and he can't stop looking at her and touching her maybe they cuddle up and eat take out or watch TV or something but Frank is just his puppy self in love with her

  
When he left New York, everything was quiet. Calm. Or, as close as a city that never sleeps can be to dreaming - he wondered if  _ shit _ , maybe he had gone and died that day at the carousel because he had never caught an inch of peace while living. 

 

But he is. He’s breathing and right now it tastes like Joshua trees, juniper thick and prickly on the shoreline and the kick of salt, sand, the sea. Frank’s never had the chance to appreciate this country, and for all its faults… 

 

It sure as hell’s a beautiful place. 

 

Watching the fat, yellow sunset on the far side of the grand canyon, or rise in the shadow of Mount Rainier, in the thicket of a forest or in the heart of the desert valley. Frank saw it all and let it stick to his ribs, let it sink past the kevlar and tucked it someplace safe. He’s not nor has he ever been a sentimentalist but maybe the new Frank gets to be. Gets to appreciate the little things, the sing of cicadas or a nice lady buying him coffee in Tucson when he complimented the apron that matched her eyes. 

 

Maybe isn’t much to go off of but it’s more than the finality of death so he’d take that, and whatever grain of good will he finds along his way. 

 

He really shouldn’t be all that surprised that, while he was gone, everything in Hell’s Kitchen had gone the way of its namesake. Worse, is that a certain Miss Page sat at the epicenter of the wreckage and all he had left of that calm is lost in the twitch of fingertips, resting against the trigger’s curve. 

 

She has got to stop making a habit of pissin’ off the worst sorts of people, even if it’s evidently in her job description as an investigative journalist, to do just that. 

 

Frank will worry about that some other time. 

 

She’s safe right now, tucked into his side and snoring. Karen had warned him, sleep heavy and slurring her speech, says that Ellison woke her up, asleep at her desk and asked her to keep it to a dull roar. 

 

Her nose twitches, eyes moving rapidly beneath their lids. She’s dreaming, and Frank finds himself wondering, not for the first time, what she dreams about. Is it his place to ask? Does he exist in her in-between? Does he have that right?

 

Frank doesn’t entertain the notion that he’s good enough for her, but he’s also not as hellbent on self-sacrifice these days so he’ll unpack that when she isn’t a warm weight in his arms and she isn’t smiling in her sleep. 

 

She shifts, huffs out a sigh and the furrow between her brow deepens, she doesn’t have the right to be this cute, not when he’d seen her fire and fury. Nearly died three times just to make sure she saw another day of living. But here they are and she’s riled up, even in her dreams, so Frank chuckles, tucks some feathery strands of her hair behind her ear and murmurs, “can’t catch a break, can ya?” 

 

When she wakes up, he’d carefully disentangled himself, left her bundled up in her favorite blankets on the couch while he sat at the kitchen table, ordering Thai food in a hushed, gruff voice. Trying to keep quiet so he wouldn’t disturb her. It isn’t that, which pulls her out of her deep, and evidently busy sleep. It’s the space he left, it’s the phantom of his arm around her waist and the spot beside the hollow of her throat that burns where he’d placed a kiss moment before. 

 

“Hey,” she rubs the sleep from her eyes, sitting up and resting her chin on the back of the couch to watch him. “Food?” With a yawn full of hope. Single syllables and short sentences are the groggy literarians best friend. 

 

Frank doesn’t mind, brevity is sort of his shtick. So he just smiles at her over the laminated edge of the take out menu and says, “yes ma’am.” 

 

Romance isn’t grand gestures, isn’t hundred thousand dollar diamonds too heavy to lift the hand its on. It’s not even fresh flowers in a vase every day. It’s the roses on the window sill that’d grown too large for the ceramic pot, so they’d been transplanted into something larger. Left to grow. To thrive. It’s the singing hush of rain against the window and the way the neon light outside makes Frank’s eyes look like liquid gold, and how her stomach fills with butterflies when she can’t look away.

 

“Perfect.” She smiles lazily, stretches her arms above her head and when she squints up at him he’s stepped over to her, his thumb sweeping back and forth across her chin. 

 

He doesn’t say anything, Frank’s always been a man of action, words are more the wheelhouse of the journalist he loved, pressed a kiss to her forehead and rested his own against it. Their touchstone of peace, comfort, of quiet worship. 

 

Coming back had meant the city, but returning to Karen is where he found himself home. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt: what would happen if Frank met Paxton?

Vermont’s cold. Not New York street cold but bone chilling, freeze your ass off, cold. Jack Frost’s got his claws dug in deep and shit,  _ shit  _ just breathing hurts out here, like his lungs are filling up on ice and it burns on the way in as much as it does when he exhales. Plumes of steam from Frank’s breath hang around his face, squinting through it as the sun mocks, glares off the snow and does absolutely  _ nothing  _ to warm him. Even dressed in black, in fifteen god damned layers, Frank Castle would rather be holed up in the Syrian desert with IEDs and mortar fire.

 

He knows what to do with war, at least. With the hot stink of death and rot and the way it clotted with bloodied sand until he spat it out, a fire-fight’s quick-dry cement. 

 

He has no fucking idea what to do here. 

 

Fagan Corners is small enough to spit across and the buildings look tired, sagging from decades of exposure to the elements - the trees are sparse near the town’s center, and there aren’t mountains close enough to shield the worst of the wind. It kicks up, Frank swears in a gruff whisper, but the snow crunching under his boots drowns it out. Not that he’d really try and complain. He knows that his five-minute tactical assessment of Karen’s hometown doesn’t give him any sort of advantage headed into the unknown. 

 

They’re walking, her hand wrapped in his and shoved into the front pocket of his sweatshirt. He’s a little less cold when he’s focused, zoned in until the world has fallen away except for the clear cut path. The plan. The mission. 

 

Some kids pass them, huddled around a cell-phone and laughing at some dumb YouTube crap, but Karen startles when they shove on by. Like their joy is gunfire and so Frank just holds her closer. He doesn’t know shit about her, about her past; not like his, which has been dug up, exploited, given a post-mortem so every dumb son of a bitch who’d watched a War Documentary can chime in on what he went through.

 

_ Think they know him _ . Not like Karen does, she’d seen the ugly, the blood the gore the  _ grief  _ and he wonders if it’s love or collateral. How you get to be this close to someone as damaged as he is and not get some part of you hooked, broken off. Shrapnel buried deeper than even a seasoned Marine knew how to dig out. 

 

_ Shit  _ though, what he knows about Karen can be measured in the hand that holds hers all the same. 

 

She’s remained a mystery in that, holed up in the bunker of her ache and Frank’s patient. He’d wait until she gave him anything. Wouldn’t pry it from her, wouldn’t make demands. 

 

And when Karen had asked him three weeks ago to go home… he’d made a fool of himself, stumbling over his words just to say  _ yeah, of course _ . 

So here they are, in the trenches and he’s going in blind.

 

Karen’s been leading him around town, quiet, occasionally commenting on landmarks that meant something to her, from her childhood. The only movie theater where some fumbling freshman boy had tried to get her bra off in the middle of  _ Armageddon _ . Or the curb she’d fallen off, twisted her ankle, and the ice cream shop across the street from it her mom took her to every day that summer because she couldn’t go swimming with Kevin or her friends. 

 

Frank nods, smiling a little; it’s slow. The Thaw. But she’s coming around when they pass the post-office and the corkboard outside is tacked with article clippings from the High School’s newspaper - Karen had written for them, her first real journalistic endeavor.

 

“Had a knack for it, huh?” His voice is rough from disuse and Karen just smiles at him crookedly, using her free hand to shield her eyes from the sun.

 

“I guess. It earned me a spot at Georgetown, studied English.” She kicks some snow, watches it melt on contact with the heated fender of a parked car. Frank nods - didn’t know that, either. Makes sense, honestly, he’d read every article she’d put out at the  _ Bulletin  _ and each one was better than the last.

 

Won’t tell her that the one she’d written about him was taped to the inside of his lunchbox, or how worn the edges of the paper were from running his fingers over it. 

 

More walking, more small talk. 

 

They stop for coffee - Karen says it wasn’t a Starbucks fourteen years ago and yeah, there’s modernization on the edge of the old town. Or an attempt at it. Orders his black, the barista looks at him like that’s a Capitol Offense. 

 

“It’s Vermont. They think salt is spicy,” she reminds him, stirring some cinnamon and nutmeg into her cup. No sweetener, and when she catches the confused look etched onto Frank’s mug she blushes. “-- it tastes good. Shut up.” 

 

He just ducks his head, hiding the amusement in his eyes and wrinkling his nose as he chokes down his drink. 

 

Now her hand in his is shaking, her palm is clammy and he takes no offense when she draws it away, wipes it off on her thigh and reaches for him again, filling the empty spaces between his fingers with practiced ease. 

 

The road turns off from the pavement, and gravel gives way when they step off the sidewalk and turn down an unmarked road. At the end, a white and blue building with a sign that’s barely intact, ‘Penny’s Diner’. Eviction notices, ugly red tape that says  _ condemned,  _ paper the sides of it, but Karen’s unflinching.

 

As if part of her had expected exactly that. 

 

Frank’s just a guard dog, got his leash caught between his teeth as he trails warily behind Karen - she knows the way, so it makes objective sense that he falls to her six. Doesn’t mean he  _ likes  _ letting her go anyplace before him. It’s tactical training, and something else. Felt that obligation gnaw at the back of his skull:  _ gotta keep her safe _ . 

 

What place is safer than some sleepy little town in the heart of Vermont? 

 

Circling around back, a mailbox with Page scrawled in a child’s handwriting marks the start of a dirt driveway, curling behind an outcropping of pine trees. Stoic, blue-green soldiers hiding the modest house behind them. 

 

Karen stops about halfway, her eyes wet with tears but there’s a stubbornness to it like she’s got something to prove by setting her jaw, sniffling, and carrying on. She won’t let them fall. But Frank’s ready to wipe them away if they do all the same.

 

Frank hangs back a little, lets her climb the three stairs, lets her open the screen and -- the moment, the beat, the  _ breath  _ before her knuckles rap against the blue front door.  _ Robin’s egg blue _ , he thinks, and when Karen turns to look at him, motioning with her chin for him to join her, he realizes that this blue, much like the blue of the diner, is the same color as her eyes. 

 

He swallows and soldiers forward, steps heavy, the wood of the deck groans underneath his added weight. 

 

He’s alert, eyes narrowed, jumping to tally every movement around them. A squirrel rushes out of the bushes, climbs the little picket fence jutting out of the side of the house, and disappears. Frank shifts his weight from foot to foot - there’s movement inside the house, but no one answers the door. 

 

It’s quiet after that in the way that nature is, makes Frank’s palms itch.

 

Birds chatter and the needly fingers of the spruce trees sway with every angry gust of wind. Some brush across the roof, others just tangle with their neighbor and catch the first few raindrops before they hit the tops of their heads. Fat, cold, the kind of rain that’s not yet snow but it’s trying to be. 

 

“We should go,” Karen’s teeth chatter, the rain picks up so he holds her tight - the thin lip of an awning over the front door keeps them dry, but only just.

 

Frank wraps his arms around her shoulders, looks over them, where the blinds part and a pair of eyes watches - disappearing as soon as they’re spotted. 

 

_ Son of a bitch.  _

 

“Nah, see… see you did the right thing. You came here, an’ no matter what he said it is your home. You have that  _ right _ .” His is ashes. Red edges in on the perimeter of his vision and he only holds Karen that much tighter keeps the tide of his rage at bay.

 

Karen sniffs, he knows that she’s crying but he won’t add insult to injury by commenting on it. He strokes his fingers through the edge of her hair and then, with one hand stroking up and down her back, he balls the other into a fist and pounds on that door again.

 

“Know you’re in there,” a growl. 

 

Karen draws away, looks up at him to hurriedly whisper, “Frank what are you  _ doing-- _ ”

 

The door swings open and Paxton’s staring them down, well, if the shock that washes over Karen’s face tells him anything - it’s what’s left of the man she’d known as her dad.

 

Frank’s stomach churns; what he wouldn’t give to have his child at the door. What he wouldn’t give to even see Lisa or Frankie again. He swallows down the hot bile rising up the back of his throat and stares Karen’s father down. 

 

“Karen I -” his words are slow, slurred. A drunk. She flinches visibly and Frank’s upper lip curls. “I told you not to come.” 

 

“Yeah, yeah you did.” But she doesn’t care, that much is obvious and despite the tension and painful discomfort of the situation, Frank feels just a little bit of pride.  _ Atta girl _ . “But the thing is, Dad, the thing is you pushed me away. Shut me out and -- I was alone, in New York. I found people and I kept going but you took away my right to mourn and I’ve spent over a decade trying to figure out how to let all this… all this rot, out of me. But I come home, I come home and you’ve just drunk it all away. Mom died, and you did nothing. Kevin died and you were all I had left, I was all you had and and ---” 

 

She has to stop, Paxton hasn’t moved, hasn’t reacted aside from the hand on the doorframe beginning to shake. Frank won’t rule that out as a byproduct of the vodka on his breath, though. His own fingers tighten against the back of Karen’s shirt. An anchor to keep him from lashing out. 

 

Her dad just -- he moves to shut the door and without thinking, Frank shoves his arm out, the pain of it being caught between the heavy wood and metal frame doesn’t bother him in the least. 

 

Karen’s turned away, rushed down the short flight of stairs to cry freely, he wouldn’t fault her for an inch of her mile-long hurt. 

 

Frank doesn’t get it, so he’s got Paxton’s sweat-stained shirt balled up between the white of his fisted knuckles and he draws him forward, speaks in that snarled, low rumble that makes his whole frame radiate rage. 

 

“See, I don’t  _ get  _ you.” Spittle catches on the corner of his lip, “Both my kids… both of them. They were taken from me and shit--  _ shit  _ I made sure the people responsible paid for it. I hunted them down like animals. ‘Cuz they were. They were animals but they’re all dead now and I don’t feel better. Doesn’t… didn’t bring them back an’ i’m not sorry for what I’ve done but they were monsters, you see? They … they were bad people who did bad things. But you..” Frank shakes his head, shaking Paxton by the hold he has on him.

 

“You lost your son and it was a tragedy. There is nothing that takes away the hurt of having to bury your flesh and blood. Buying a tombstone for your baby is the worst kinda hell there is but you -- you lost one kid and threw the other one away and I get it. I get… I get that you blame her and shit I’d have been just as angry but the thing is.. The thing  _ is _ , is that people screw up and people like Karen? They hold that coal in their hand for the rest of their life. She’s done good, she’s… she’s saved lives, you know? And you chose not to be a part of that. I don’t get … Karen’s the best thing okay? The best thing to happen to me since… since all the good was taken from me. And she asked me to come her because shit, maybe she though havin’ me around would make her brave but she’s always been braver than me. Karen sees the shit she’s done and holds herself accountable. I just try and lock it up. Try and keep myself separate and you know what.” Those last three words are grit out, caught on his teeth so he throws Paxton down, kicking the door the rest of the way open as he scrambles backward on his hands and heels, reaching for the phone.

  
  
Frank grabs it out of his hands, rips it out of the wall, “No. No I’m not gonna do nothin’ and you’re not gonna call the cops on me or Karen and you’re gonna wallow.” He kneels, looks that man right in the eyes, the vein in his jaw twitching, “You’re gonna spend the rest of your days knowing that you missed out. That you had … you had a chance to be a good man. A good father and you let your hate win out. Now listen to  _ me-- _ ” He ducks his head, can hear Karen rush back up out of fear - he won’t hurt Paxton Page. As god as his witness he wanted to, wanted to beat the miserable slump into a bloody pulp but he can’t do that to Karen. 

 

“We’re gonna leave. And you’re gonna forget we came. You’re gonna make a choice. Either rot in your god damned filth, drink the rest of yourself away. Or you’re gonna… you’re gonna get help. Because the shit that happens to us ain’t our fault but what you do... What you do with what you’re given is. If you decide to get your shit together. If you choose to live. You can beg Karen to maybe forgive you, and I maybe won’t put a bullet in your head.” 

 

He doesn’t wait for a response, doesn’t want to hear what he’d have to say. Frank stands, feels Karen reach for him. 

 

Two hands.

 

“Let’s go home,” her voice is even and despite the tears in her eyes, Karen’s offering Frank a weak smile. 

 

And they do. They leave. 

 

Karen tells him, her head on his shoulder as they pull out of the Essex station; the train humming to life underneath them… tells him, “No one’s ever put my da-- _ Paxton Page _ in his place before. It was…. Did you mean what you said to him?”

  
  
“Every word.” 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt: Can you write how their scene would end if Amy didn't interrupt them?

 

 Karen Page deserves better than him. Frank knows that, objectively, but he’s just this side of selfish enough to want her to stay. To want the venom and that fire she’d freely spew his direction whenever he went and got the idiot idea to push her away.

 

_Shit_ , Karen really had his number from day one.

 

She’d rolled in like a category five before his sentencing, back when things were simple and it was vengeance that fueled him alone. Rotting in his goddamned jail cell might as well have been a fuckin’ poem when she’d hollered at him, pushed and pushed, dug and dug - molded him into something serviceable for court.

 

How far they’d come, all she’s seen, and somehow Karen continues to defend him, fiercely.

 

_Make it mean something._

 

Give Karen an inch, Frank. He knows her better than to make a mile of it.

 

He’s not … good. He’s not whole but shit, who really ever is? He felt the sting of his words still, sitting heavy and ugly in the air.  _I don’t want to._  Which translated directly to: _I don’t want you_. And that’s a goddamn lie.

 

He’d been honest with Karen from day one and Frank isn’t going to let that change, he won’t make a weapon out of his fear and he’d never, ever use it on her.

 

Because he is afraid, as soon as she’d said it didn’t change how she felt, Frank knew he was gonna have to fish for something to push her back, when all he really wanted to do was to grab. To take. To use two hands and never let go.

 

But that’s the idealization of things so, like a fucking idiot, he’d named dropped Murdock out of the hopes he’d pull on her heartstrings and she’d back off. He really is a piece of shit, garbage, the Punisher maybe but just right then he’s some low-life asshole hurting the only person who’d ever seen him as something more.

 

_Go. Leave. I’m already dead._

 

Frank’s got ten thousand thoughts cycling viciously and they’re ripping through his memories like shrapnel. All of them. Every one of her. Had been a high point while he was stuck in the hole he’d dug himself into.

 

She loves him and he wanted nothing more than to be free to love her back. But he’d tried, right? He’d tried and it went to shit in the blink of an eye. Maybe that..  Maybe that’s not a fair expectation to hold her to because if anyone can see through Frank’s bullshit it’s Karen Page. And she is, she’s seeing through it despite tears he’d put in her eyes and before he can think he’s tearing off the stupid blood pressure sensors, the pulse oximeter, and some IV hooked up to a bag of clear gunk. He’d told her to leave but the moment she took him up on it, Frank’s making a fool of himself, trying to get to her while broken and slow, before she’s gone and he didn’t know if he’d ever see her again.

 

“Wait, just–”  _Stupid mother fuckin-_ — he throws the tangle of bed sheets to the wayside and stumbles to his feet. Karen waits, because she’s too good… she’s all good .. all heart and he’d gone and hurt it. He’s out of breath, three or four or seven broken ribs but it’s mostly her, she’d stolen the air from his lungs and he can’t even bring himself to be anything but happy about it.

 

She makes a sound, resignation, maybe.

 

Does she know how beautiful she is? He’s beaten to all hell and she’s dressed like an angel, the irony isn’t lost on him but Frank can’t care. He can’t because he’s rapidly running out of chances to show Karen that he – that he’s a broken man, that he’s deeply and profoundly flawed but beneath, between , and imbedded in the steel of that is the simple fact that he’s also a man who’d been in love with her for as long as he can remember.

 

Frank can’t bring himself to regret a single moment they’ve shared, the circumstance of each notwithstanding because he’s … he’s gotten to have this, have her in his life in spite of his tendency towards self-sacrifice. He’s kept her at arms length, not because he wants it, but because he wants her so badly it’s hard to fuckin breathe. His fingers are shaking where his arms hang limply by his side and he’s looking her up and down real slow. Catch his meanin’, why he’s coming closer and closer until he can feel her nervous sigh.

 

“I gotta get out of here and you can’t come with me.” Frank hates having to say it, hates having to leave. He’s walked away from Karen a dozen times by now and it never got a goddamned bit easier. Every time, it felt a little bit like he’s leaving a part of himself behind.

 

Karen’s eyes are wide and wet and so blue he’s left drowning in the space between her last breath, and his next.

 

“Just-” She’s gonna say something, and it’s probably some flowery speech he doesn’t deserve to hear about her feelings he has no right to. So Frank steps even closer and the hospital room fades away, everything’s gone but Karen and the hand she’s got resting against his chest. She must be able to feel the heavy beat of his heart. Not once, not while nightmares tore him out of sleep, did it race, but now its so fast he’s genuinely worried it’ll beat straight out from behind the cage of his ribs.

 

It’s quiet where they stand, his bare feet stick a bit to the shitty, generic linoleum, and he’s pretty sure there’s enough painkillers in his bloodstream to down a horse but he’s stubborn and this is it. This is his shot. And he’s not gonna let it slip away.

 

“Karen,” her name’s on the backbone of his doubt, branded there and before he can talk himself out of it, Frank bends forward and presses his lips to hers.

 

It’s soft, at first, uncertain. Neither of them had done this in a while, not with anyone who had this much power.  But the moment that Karen reciprocates, when she shifts to have both hands against the flat of his chest and he can feel her mouth parting, Frank chases everything they’d never let themselves have.

 

His hands are reflexively at her waist, his thumb sweeping back and forth over the silk of her shirt, feeling the line of her ribs underneath. She’s the stronger of the two, and Karen rolls forward onto the balls of her feet (where the fuck are her shoes?) and kisses him more urgently. Frank turns his head, their noses bumping and he smiles, letting it break the seal of their lips just for a moment so she could know how good this fucking felt.  _Finally_.

 

All his edges are blunted, the big bad Punisher is moldable, pliable, letting Karen scrape her short nails against the hair at the nape of his neck. He doesn’t even mind when she’s pressed up against him, every one of his wounds screaming in protest but he can’t feel them, doesn’t register pain while the rest of him is alive and burning because he’s waited what’s felt like a decade to give in. To touch her without it being his body as a shield from bullets. To feel her, without metal sticking out of his arm.

 

There’s no gunfire, not bombs, no reason to stop (aside from time, time’s always and never, been on their side), so Frank’s going to drag his teeth across her lower lip, feel her shiver and steal the sound that works its way out of her chest. It’s want. It’s need. It’s love and lust and it’s demanding to take what they can while they’re able.

 

Frank doesn’t want to pull away, but he does. His lips are swollen and rubbed pink, and he presses them, featherlight, in an overlapping sequence of kisses along the slope of her jaw, her neck, feeling where her heart races just above where her necklace hangs.

 

The door opens and he freezes, head hanging where his forehead had come to rest against her shoulder. Frank swallows, adams apple bobbing by the time he draws back, looks at Karen and she looks away. So he cups her chin with his hand, aware of how his fingers shake.

 

“Take care.” It’s hollow. She’s already slipping away but not before she presses something in his hand. Rough cardstock, he sweeps his finger over the raised lettering and smiles fondly when he sees her name tacked onto the ‘Nelson & Murdock’ bit. Her cell number’s scrawled on the back, and he’ll keep it. Of course he will. But he’s got so much ahead of him there’s no knowing if he’d ever stop moving enough to use it.

 

Even if and when he should.

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt: Real talk: karen and frank's first kiss, how do you imagine it?

“Thanks, Karen.”

 

He’s said it a hundred thousand other nights, and every single time its goodbye. But Frank’s caught, one foot out the door and knee deep in blood, in gunfire and the bullshit stink of the crime syndicate he’s hunting down. Or maybe it’s a corrupt family of lawmakers, politicians; it’s all blurred together by now. It’s either kill or be killed and so far, he’s the only one left standing.

 

He’s caught, one foot out the door.

 

But the other inside.

 

Karen’s already turned away, to clear the cache from her computer so Micro can do what he does, make everything else untraceable. Keep her safe, Frank had insisted when this little trio had gotten together six months ago. All under the guise of doing what’s right, skirting the law and when absolutely necessary. Breaking it.

 

She’s tired, the slump of her shoulder makes the too-big sweatshirt slip off of it. Bare skin flecked in roan freckles and Frank’s breath catches in his throat. He’s faced down the barrel of a gun more times than he can count, he’d been in a firefight of twelve versus one, and he’d nearly been blown to hell by a bomb (or two, or three). And he’d never been as disarmed as he was by this. By that. By  _her_.

 

He swallows, starts and stops whatever he’s going to say before deciding against it. He shakes his head in silent reprimand, _don’t be stupid, Frank._

 

Knowing better than to encroach on an intimacy that exists, an overspun thread between them. Sometimes it draws so tight he thinks finally,  _finally_ , his hands can do something other than hurt. He can’t wash the blood off of them, not ever, not completely, but she’d done some kind of miracle when she held them between her own, he can’t see it. Doesn’t notice anything other than how deceptively soft they are, how she fills the empty slots between his scarred and gnarled fingers.

 

Frank’s staring down now, woodgrain drawn into sharp focus, Karen’s rounded the corner and he’s chewing up all the things he had not said. His chance is gone, he hears the sink running and knows she’s washing their coffee mugs. Erasing every trace that he’d been here on the off chance the NYPD caught his scent and followed it back to her.

 

A good lead. He’s here enough. Working a case or just… pretending he’s got anything human left in him that craves human things.

 

He’s self-aware enough to recognize that maybe, maybe he liked coming around just to watch her smile, catch the strawberry smell of her shampoo when she stood in front of the window.  _Shit_ , maybe he even liked the way she yelled at him when he’d turn a trail into a crime scene.

 

What he wouldn’t give to have that every night, every morning, and all the time in between.

 

But he’s no good for her, and not in a way that paints him as a martyr for unrequited love. He’d only ever get Karen hurt and he’d promised every star in the sky, the memory of the people he failed before, that he would not let anyone else die in the line of his fire. Not one more goddamn person.

 

He’s not sure if that’s love; willing to choke it down if it meant keeping them safe. Keeping them whole. It’s poison, how it rots – yeah, but he knew intimately that the only people who could make you feel that way are the people you let in, the people close enough to stick the blade between your ribs until you can’t fucking breathe.

 

She’s the prettiest blade he’d ever seen, and Frank’s only thinly aware that he’s still standing in her doorway, holding onto it. His fingers pressed until his knuckles have gone from white to purple, the wood threatening to splinter under his grip.

 

Indecision, evidently.

 

Frank’s not a selfless guy, he knows a lot of what he does in the name of justice, in vengeance is really just blind rage honed in on a singular target, an end event that he himself has shaped. But shit, shit he’s just – trying to do what he can with the life he’s been given. It looked a bit more like a life these days.

 

His after, Frank ducks his head, making a choice. _I am home._

 

The door closes but he’s on the inside of it, and the sound jars Karen enough that she peaks around the corner warily.

 

“I thought you left a while ago,” She’s got a hand to her chest, eyes wide and round and so  _fucking_ blue Frank’s just staring at her, a little bit lost at sea.

 

His fingers twitch at his side, “Yeah I– I shoulda and I–” Nostrils flaring bullishly, posture defensive and his eyes full of an unnamed fear. He’s not good at this part. He’d never been good at this part. Had almost talked himself into a hole before getting around to proposing to Maria and, apparently, that much has remained true to the Frank from before.

 

“I say thank you but I don’t.. I don’t think you get. It.” the last two words stick to his teeth so he has to huff them out, taking a couple of steps forward. Stopping. Resume the impatient shuffling in place. “You don’t get it, do you, Karen?” His adam’s apple bobs and some part of him becomes aware that he’s trembling.

 

“What do you mean?” Worry eats at her tone and her brows draw in like they do when she’s thinking to hard, staring at some article from 1983 and digging down to its roots. Frank would smile, but he’s a coward. A coward who doesn’t have any words left in his arsenal to tell her. To make her see.

 

_See what she did to him._

 

Frank closes the distance, his boots heavy against the floor but it’s all silent to the racing of his heart. One hand against the back of her neck, thumb sweeping the elegant architecture, feeling her pulse stutter, jumping to meet his beat for beat. He leans down, forehead to hers and just in that second he waits. Lets her pull away if he’d read this wrong. If he was wrong. _Slap him, Karen_. Tell him he’s selfish as his broken nose has no place to go but aside her own, or how her breath is warm, smells like coffee with a dash of Irish whiskey hanging in the air between their lips.

 

He wants to kiss her, and the ferocity of that is only kept at bay with his unwillingness to take. He’d never taken, not an inch, not a sentence. He’d asked, please, he’d given her an out at every turn but the stubborn girl named Karen Page wouldn’t pass, wouldn’t leave. Never once backed down.  _Atta girl_.

 

Instead of pushing him away, her hands are on his chest. Fisting in his jacket, his shirt, until the sting of her nails bites into his skin underneath and she’s pulling him forward. Closer.

 

And then they kiss and it’s slow at first, the unsteady way a wave greets the shore and they break away, smiling to themselves with secrets tucked away. She kisses him, and there’s nothing nervous about it. It is absolute, it is certain. It is inevitable.

 

He could not love her in halves.

 

His hands fall from where they’d come to tentatively fit along the curve of her jaw, to her waist, lower, fitting under the curve of her ass and he uses the leverage she’s granted him – her arms snaking around Frank’s neck and hears, “easy tiger” when she stops kissing him long enough to breathe. 

 

He grins, hoisting her up and then the wall is hard behind her but somehow his fingers have pillowed the back of her head, always a gentleness even on the edge of his teeth catching her lower lip. Only held aloft by how Frank leans into her, and how Karen holds him tighter and tighter until there’s nothing left in between them but frantic breaths.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> prompt: Karen finds a stray dog and doesn't know the first thing about caring for it, so she calls Frank.

“Fr—Frank, stop– stop laughing I’m  _serious_. He’s chewed through half of my shoes. And I mean that literally, only the left pair — I think he’s trying to make a statement.” She’s snapping into her phone, rapid-fire, trying to talk while fielding Frank’s gut-busting laughter – he’s in absolute stitches while Cujo claws plaintively at the bathroom door. She’s holed up in there, like an anti-canine bunker, pacing the short distance between the bathtub, and the sink.

 

Frank finally does calm down, she can hear the crinkle of something, a newspaper, maybe? through the static connection “What, Page? Never had a puppy before?” The smile in his voice is as clear to her as if he was standing by her side. She’s too annoyed to be endeared, and her face twists up into a scowl.

 

“No, Frank. My parents didn’t let us have pets and – well – I’m more of a cat person, anyway.” She lies, and whatever Frank's doing, he stops.

 

“Makes sense.”

 

Karen’s not sure what that’s supposed to mean, but she certainly doesn’t take it as praise. The stomp of her heel is audible over the phone, “Please. Help.”

 

A deep, brooding sigh on his end, but he grumbles out, “Okay okay, ‘m on my way. Don’t worry little red.” The line drops, and Karen stares down at the blank screen of her phone in a combination of dismay and annoyance.

 

_Very funny._

 

This dog just might be the  _actual_ big bad wolf.

 

An absurd thought while she runs her hand through her hair and pleads with it in a hushed, panicked whisper:  _does that make Frank the Huntsman?_

 

 _Whatever_. Fairy tales are bullshit and her phone charger is on the other side of this door, so she puts on a brave face, and opens it.

 

Fear makes things larger than life, and this knee-high pit bull’s tail thumps happily against the hardwood floor. “Oh, so  _now_ you’re happy to see me.” A raspy ‘woof’, Karen purses her lips, alright. Fine. Okay.

 

“Do you want … something to eat? Food?” He rises on all fours, tail going Mach 3.  _Now_ they’re getting somewhere.

 

Karen sticks close to the wall, like some housewife from the 1950’s lifting her skirt to escape a mouse. Only this mouse is about eighty pounds with a wide mouth full of teeth and looking at her with a glob of drool caught in its low hanging jowls.

 

Fantastic.

 

“I don’t have dog food,” conversationally, the click-clack of nails on the hardwood floor trailing after her is  _kind_ of endearing, as are the happy little snuffling sounds that accompany whatever she says to him. Like he understands.

 

“But–” Karen taps her finger on her chin, grabs a bowl from the cabinet and sets it on the floor. He goes up to it, sniffs the empty porcelain, and looks up at Karen like ‘what gives?’  “Hold on I’m improvising.”

 

Another woof, “You’re impatient. Wait. Sit.”

 

He listens to that last command, tail thumping even louder now that it’s against her kitchen tile.

 

Karen lofts a brow, pulls a steak and some frozen vegetables from her fridge, a quick google search says that all the ingredients would meet his nutritional needs, and so she sets to cooking it.

 

“I don’t need to season the sirloin, do I?” More to herself, as her own stomach growls once the meat is cooking – the realization that this dog is about to eat better than she does, and she’d been saving that steak for Frank – well, it’s his fault that she saw the damn thing and felt bad enough to bring him up to her apartment, anyway.

 

He was sitting on her complex’s stoop for Christ’s sake, all mopey eyed, half-soaked from the rain and seeking shelter from it under the meager awning. Karen’s compassion outweighed concern and now she’s got a giant grey shadow with soft brown eyes that seem far wiser than any dog’s ought to be.

 

Time passes by in companionable silence, Karen won’t admit it, not even to herself, but it’s nice to have another … living, breathing soul in her home. It’s less lonely, she even catches herself smiling as she spoons out the food into the bowl.

 

“Now–it’s hot, let it cool down.” She sets it on the counter out of his reach for good measure, he barks once,  _loud_. “Don’t get mouthy with me, I just cooked you a three-course meal and all I’ve had today is a half a cup of coffee and some cheese-its I stole off of Ellison’s desk.” Not that a dog would understand any of what she’s said, but his mouth hangs open in a canine approximation of a grin, and Karen returns it.

 

When she tests the heat of the food, and it seems palatable, Karen kneels with the bowl in hand, eyeing him warily.

 

“Alright, don’t get it in your head that I’m going to be feeding you like this daily. This is a special occasion. Because I didn’t have anything else.” He licks his nose, Karen takes that as a ‘get on with it’, and he immediately buries his face in the food.

 

No sooner had she sacrificed the only groceries in her fridge, than Frank comes through her front door, a bag of dog food on one shoulder, and a black plastic bag in the other.

 

“– you been cookin’?” Karen resents the disbelief in his voice, but he’s smiling at her so she’ll forgive him. “Seems like you got ‘Cujo’ under control here, Miss Page.”

 

Karen’s rebuttal is offered when she rises, dusting her knees off and adjusting her now-wrinkled skirt, “Yes. He was starving and just because I’ve never taken care of a dog before doesn’t mean I’m going to be cruel to this one.”

 

But Frank’s not really listening, just staring at the dog - or what he can see of him, since he’s half-immersed in the too-big bowl, teeth rattling against the bottom of it as he practically strips the paint from the porcelain.

 

“Where’d you say you found him?” Voice unerringly even, it startles Karen, given the domesticity of the moments just before. She blinks, tucks a strand of hair over her ear, and follows Frank’s hardened line of sight, watching the dog push the empty bowl around the kitchen floor while searching for scraps.

 

“He was on the building’s doorstep. Trying to hide out from the rain.”

 

Frank sets his supplies down on the couch before making his way to stand right beside the dog, looking like he’s seen a ghost all the while.

 

“Hey boy,” gruff, but the dog’s ears perk up at that and if at all possible, his tail’s wagging harder than it ever has before. “You come back for me? Huh?” Now he’s sitting on the floor and there’s a torpedo of solid-dog muscle launching itself into Frank’s lap, full body wiggles and happy, high pitched whines fill the quiet.

 

“You two know each other?” She can’t mask the amusement from her voice, and so Karen doesn’t try. Seeing Frank Castle with a dog in his arms is about the sweetest thing, so she’s not about to ruin the moment. Frank’s so rarely happy, or genuinely, thoroughly happy but the smile on his face right now? It’s the before smile, the one he’d had in the pictures all over his house, and it makes her heart tighten just a little.

 

“Yeah, he was one of the fightin’ boys for the Kitchen Irish, stole him when I uh,  _interrupted_ their operations. Hadn’t seen him since they cut him loose.” He’s scrubbing blunt nails over his scalp, happy as can be.

 

“Does he have a name? Now that you’re here and he’s basically a marshmallow with teeth, I don’t think Cujo’s all that fitting.” Even if she’d only ever said it jokingly.

 

Frank gives him some consideration, “Nah, but he looks like a Beretta to me, don’t you boy?” More tail wagging, and a loud series of happy barks– bouncing between lying on Frank, and zooming around the small apartment.

 

“After a gun? Really, Frank?” Karen isn’t actually chastising him, if anything she’s amused but Frank looks up from where he’s still sitting, and reaches for Karen’s hand, the rough pad of his thumbs sweep over her knuckles. A fond, reserved gesture but it’s enough to make her bite her lip and look over her shoulder to watch ‘Beretta’ get his head stuck in the bag Frank had brought in - turns out it’s full of toys, a dish for food, and one for water; Karen learns this because the contents spill out and he’s got a tennis ball in his mouth that he presses wetly against her calf.

 

“I’ll take you out to play when it’s  _not_ raining, okay?”

 

Frank chuckles, sniffs, wipes the drool from where it stuck to her leg with his sleeve, “Yeah, the m9 was uh, my ‘go to’ during my years in the Corp, security. Safety. Familiarity. Kept my brother’s safe, my family–” He stops nose wrinkling as he sniffs again, looking at the dog that’s gnawing happily on his new toys, “figure since he’s goin’ to be stayin’ with yo–  _us_ , there’s gotta be a reason he came back, you know? So he can keep you safe when I can’t.”

 

Karen’s not a dog person, but as it turns out, this mutt with scars on his ears and the worst breath she’d ever smelled (and she used to work in a pro bono defense office) is not just some four-legged hellhound, but a part of her family that just sort of fit. It didn’t take long to win her over and maybe that’s okay.

 

They have their little piece of happiness here because sometimes a family is the Punisher, a persistent journalist, and a dog named after a handgun.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: the way you said "i love you": prompt 22. muffled, from the other side of the door.

It’s six months after she’d told him to make it mean something. _Six months_ , since he’d fallen a mile short of delivering and Karen’s got her footing in a life built without him. Not that she’d ever seriously entertained the alternative.

 

That, maybe, just maybe, she’d done her waiting, paid her dues in heartbreak and loneliness. Maybe just this once she gets to win, and Frank would be there by her side. A couple times a week at best, she knows he’d never stay, knows he has to keep moving, like a shark in bloodied water - at rest, they can’t breathe. At rest, they died.

 

But it has been six fucking months and the only way she sees the passage of time is that her bi-annual hair appointment is coming up next Tuesday, just a trim, keep it healthy. Cut off the dead ends.

 

She’d laugh at the irony if she wasn’t so entrenched in her unwillingness to let him go.

 

Karen’s not the girl who waits around and pines. She’s been in love with a dead man for years and that’s not about to change. So she does as she always has in the past; throws herself headlong into work. Freelancing for the Bulletin, doing private investigation for the law offices of Nelson, Murdock & Page, there are no shortage of distractions. Because that’s what her adult life has amounted to. Not being happy, but being focused on something else so wholly she didn’t have time to look at the shape her world has taken for too long.

 

She’d said it. Said  _love_ out loud, to Frank Castle, and she immediately should have known better. Caught up with him facing down death for the thousandth time, seeing his motivations skewed and all the leg work she’d done to prove his innocence, again, amount to nothing – she was at her wit’s end. Worn to the bone and so sick and tired of pretending that the things people say and do to her don’t have a lasting impact.

 

No more silence, she’d made herself heard. And he’d thrown it in her face. Karen should have been fuming, spitting angry at the person she had and would stick her neck out for time and time again. Wishing that her love didn’t then feel like a guillotine.

 

Karen had anger, yeah. She’d had  _plenty_ of that but it had slowly ebbed until it became a dull ache, a nagging want that sits cold and lonely behind her heart. Karen moved on, moved forward,  _a good luck Frank_ whispered into the nascent glow of hospital lights, a kaleidoscope of primary colors painted by her unshed tears.

 

This isn’t her first choice, cradling a bottle of merlot in between her thighs while trying to reach her laptop and open it, all without spilling wine on her couch. Again. Alone in her apartment with only the pinging of her radiator to keep the quiet from swallowing her whole.

 

Karen’s mastered the art of pretending her pain away; if she doesn’t look at it, doesn’t give it any of her energy, it can’t twist itself into a big ugly beast. It can’t hurt her if she stays an arm’s length away.

 

Tonight, she’s just picked a bottle of two buck chuck to be the deterrent, armor by way of dissociation. Matt will give her shit in the morning when she comes in smelling like leftover Thai and a distillery but its water off of a WASP’s back; she can handle midtown passive aggressive and is a black belt in smiling her way through rage.

 

That’s tomorrow’s problem because tonight? Tonight she’s going to watch the bachelor, she’s going to drink this entire bottle, and nothing on heaven or earth will make her feel guilty for stealing back a bit of normalcy into her life. The line between self-care and self-destruction is getting more and more blurred as her thirties continue to throw curveballs her way, but Karen’s smart enough to see it for what it is, even if tired enough to stand back and watch it passively.

 

She’s forty-five minutes into crying over artificial romance when she hears a loud thudding outside, muffled, but close - it’s on her floor, whatever it is (or, whoever). With walls as thin as these, she’s used to tuning out the lives of her neighbors. But, again, and a couple more times before there’s a knocking on her door and it just about startles a yelp out of her.

 

Karen grabs the .380 out of her purse and adjusts the hem of her sleep shirt. A washed out Georgetown logo on the front, grey and drab and on the theme with the overall mood of her evening.

 

“Who is it?” The peephole hasn’t worked right since she’d slammed it coming home from the hospital. It’s askew in the track so all she can see peering through it is the inside of her door. Which isn’t helpful, at all, hence the gun with the safety ticked back, her thumb on the hammer but her palm sitting on the grip, nowhere near the trigger.

 

There’s no one she expects, too late to be any neighbors or cold calling salespeople.

 

“It’s me.” A gruff reply.

 

Frank.

 

She’s not proud of the fact that she latches the top chain lock loud enough for him to hear it.

 

He sighs, even with a door between them and her eyes closed tight, Karen can all but see the way his nose twitches when he does it.

 

“Kar— please I..” His voice catches, starts on the backend of another grumbled noise and then stops again. This continues as he works through whatever it is he wants to get out, the frustration thick enough that she struggles to breathe through it. “I got some things I need… need to say.” Muttered, sticking to the roof of his mouth like he’s retelling a memory, something distant, broken, far away.

 

Karen’s heart clenches in her chest, her palms now braced against the door with her gun left forgotten on the floor.

 

“Then say it.” Failing to keep the hurt from her voice. It’s as sharp as glass, cutting up her mouth on the way out and Karen can’t really manage to be sorry for it. If it’s pain, at least it’s honest. At least it’s something more than another ‘almost’ suspended like a mobile, mocking, just out of reach.  

 

Frank adjusts his posture, pressing his weight onto his good leg with the old wood beneath his feet groans sympathetically, “you really gonna just.. Have me stand out here like a jackass?” Trying at levity, she can even hear the start of a laugh.

 

Karen shuts that shit down with a quickness, “you  _are_ a jackass.” A pause, a beat, like he’s waiting for her to take it back, “so whatever you’ve got to say to me, Frank. You can stand out there and say it.” She does  _not_ care that she’s being petulant, stubborn to the bone and maybe Frank has come to recognize that fact; she’s always been a storm.

 

“Right, okay.” The door shifts in its frame and she can tell that he’s leaning against it, so she does the same, her back to faded wood stain, sliding down until the floor is solid beneath her thighs. It’s strange, this foreign, diluted comfort. Frank’s broad and safe and even with something between them, she can feel the way it rushes up her limbs, a slowly spreading warmth, that, by the time it reaches her heart, is entirely flame.

 

“When I…” his voice tremors, “when I said I couldn’t tell you how much it meant to me… that you’d been there. That you stayed. I– Karen you called my bluff in a big way and I gotta tell you, I was really fuckin’ scared.” There’s laughter there, but it’s dry, dusting off the parts of himself vulnerable enough to get through this, “ ‘cuz I know you know. You… you have’ta know. I got to thinkin’..right?  That you’re  _stubborn_ , but not without reason. Maybe.. Maybe I didn’t have to say it because you already knew…” He trails off, swallowing, and his head sags backward heavily, another ‘thud’, and Karen has to bite her lip to keep from smiling.

 

Karen hates how quickly he’s come in, her whirlwind of a man, swept up all her sadness like she’s never been anything but glad. All the time he’s been away, gone in an instant and she wants to hold onto it, sharpen that loneliness into a point, anything to remind her why she’s mad. Why he’s saying this from her hallway and not in her arms.

 

“Talked myself in circles, sittin there in a fuckin’ hospital dress, my ass out, feelin’ every bit the piece of shit that I am and Karen I just— I guess I was scared of somethin’ else, too. That.. that if I said it, you’d stick around. Put yourself into some maggot scum’s crosshairs again, for me. And I cannot… I can’t…” This isn’t the same machismo shit, not the puffed up chest and sense of guardianship. He’s not her sentinel just then, it’s a part of the confessional she’d never gotten to see. Not before.

 

“I know you can take care of yourself, Karen. Never doubted that. Not for a single minute. But I can’t – can’t give you a life like that. Can’t offer you up… whatever the hell’s left of me and say it’s good enough for someone like you. And don’t go givin’ me the bullshit that you can decide that for yourself. I know that. I know you’ll fuckin’ pick me because you have shit taste in men.” It’s meant to be a joke, but Karen knows that Frank thinks about the same of himself.

 

Karen holds back a whimper; it takes all her mental, physical, and emotional fortitude to slow herself from diving into the deep blue sea of wanting him anyway. Because he’s right. She does. No matter what the fuck happens; gunshots, blacksmiths, bombs and blackbirds, one fact remains true in absolution.

 

That Karen Page loves Frank Castle, and he loves her the same.

 

“I should’a made it mean somethin’, Karen. I shoulda and I didn’t and I – I was a goddamn coward. Couldn’t even look you in the eyes when you left, shit.” He’s crying, too. She can’t see it, but she can feel it, a phantom mirror of the own tracking down her cheeks.

 

She’s quiet, and he’s quiet, but it isn’t the same silence that’s been eating away at her for weeks. It’s an understanding between what he’d said, and what she hadn’t.

 

“Karen?” Frank’s voice is hardly recognizable just then, rough and soft, somehow, less a whisper and more a plea.

 

She answers him with the sound of her three sets of locks clicking, and the groan of the door, and Frank scrambles up to his feet.

 

No words exchanged, he’s said enough, and when he steps through the threshold and into her home it feels a bit like he’d never left. Like her life had been holding its breath, waiting for him, and now it can let it out in a sound like relief.

 

“Hey,” she wipes at her face with the heel of her hands as he’s turning around, lowering the hood that had kept his face in shadow.

 

“Hey.” Frank offers her a weak smile in return.

 

And just like that, he’s home.

**Author's Note:**

> as always, feel free to send me prompts, you might even see them featured here! [my tumblr!](https://karenpage.tumblr.com/).


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